The Ice Storm: A Novel

Rick Moody

Nov 2015 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

The national bestseller and basis for the Ang Lee film is a “powerful” novel of two troubled families during a blizzard in 1970s suburban Connecticut (Newsday).

A potentially devastating blizzard approaches New Canaan, Connecticut, while internal forces of desire, frustration, and ennui threaten to tear apart two quintessentially affluent, suburban families. Elena Hood rightfully suspects her husband, Benjamin, is having an affair with neighbor Janey Williams, while Benjamin resents Elena and his mounting feelings of ineptitude. As the snow begins to fall, Benjamin and Elena, as well as Janey and her husband, attend a neighborhood “key party,” where they and other respectable suburbanites agree to go home with whomever’s keys they draw from a bowl. Meanwhile, the Hoods’ and Williams’s teenage children are caught up in their own experimentations with sex and drugs as they test the boundaries of their structured upbringing.
 
With author Rick Moody’s sharp eye for the nuances of suburban life and allusions to 1970s America from Watergate to the Fantastic Four, the novel’s landscape is vivid and immersive. This timeless, unforgettable novel is a compassionate portrayal of flawed characters and reflects Rick Moody’s sharp eye for the contradictions of suburban life.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rick Moody including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

Ratings and reviews

This novel of 1970's suburbia with its excess, detachment and moral confusion/desperation is very much in the style of John Updike, yet more personal.

About the author

Rick Moody (b. 1961) is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Born in New York City, he graduated from Brown University and earned a master of fine arts in creative writing from Columbia University. His first novel, Garden State, won the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award, and his memoir of his struggles with alcoholism and depression, The Black Veil, was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of Memoir. His 1994 bestseller, The Ice Storm, was adapted into a film starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. Moody’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Details, and the New York Times. His work has also been selected for the Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His story “The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven” won the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize. Moody currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at New York University.